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Part 1 of the Gifts of Neurodivergence Series
🦋 The Takeaways
Belief: Anxiety is a weakness to overcome.
Reality: Anxiety is energy, neither good nor bad, and I get to conduct where it goes.
Action: Externalize the anxious voice, then treat what’s left as energy to direct.
⭐️ Introduction
Welcome to a new series: The Gifts of Neurodivergence.
For years I wrote about my ADHD from one angle: how do I cope with it? How do I succeed in spite of it? This series flips that question. I want to look at my traits without grading them good or bad, superpower or kryptonite, and see them all as gifts. And a gift is what you make of it.
This is my approach to practicing radical acceptance: being able to say I am proud of who I am, and I accept myself for all that I am. This is a new practice for me, and we’ll learn how to do it together.
I’m starting with the gift of anxiety.
First off, I want to be clear up front that I’m not saying anxiety isn’t a clinical condition or a real disability. It is.
However, when you practice accepting it, you can learn to conduct its energy to help you get things done instead of holding you in place.
😵💫 The Belief — Anxiety Is a Weakness
I used to dream of a life without anxiety. I assumed everyone else didn’t have it and it was just a me problem. Clinically, the American Psychological Association defines anxiety as an emotion marked by tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like a raised heart rate, and an anxiety disorder as worry that becomes excessive, persistent, and hard to control.
I know that version well, and my ADHD meds help treat it. But for years I collapsed all of it into one idea: an anxious person was a flawed person, and anxiety was a defect to overcome.
That framing gave me only one relationship with it: management. Suppress it, make sure no one notices it, and count every anxious moment as a small failure. If anxiety was purely a weakness, then feeling it was proof I hadn’t fixed myself yet.
The trouble is that treating anxiety as only a flaw blinds you to what it’s doing for you. You spend so much energy trying to shut it off that you never learn what it’s good for, or how to aim it.
🤝 The Reality — Anxiety Is Energy
Here’s what I see now: anxiety is a gift, and a gift is what you make of it. I define my anxiety as the ability to imagine a million ways something can go wrong before I’ve even started. Framed that way, it stops sounding like a weakness.
One of my favorite things to tell new clients about anxiety:
I want the most anxious engineer designing my airplane, and the most anxious mechanic doing its maintenance. I want to know they’ve been meticulous with their work and time.
I don’t want that person choosing what’s for dinner.
It’s the same gift that makes me change my mind 3 times on what time we’ll leave on a trip and annoy my wife.
When it’s dialed right, it makes me good at my job. When it isn’t, I overthink a decision until I can’t move at all. The anxiety that helps me steer someone else through their hardest problem is the same anxiety that freezes me on my own.
Seen through that light, I want to see anxiety as the gift of energy. The energy to see and do more than others. (To be clear, still a disability, not a superpower.)
In doing so, I gain the power to conduct where it goes. Anxiety is my energy. And I have far more say over how I direct it than I ever believed.
🛠️ The Action — Conduct the Energy
You don’t get rid of anxiety. You learn to pick it up like a baton and point it somewhere useful. Two practices help me do that.
Externalize it.
Anxiety is always loudest inside your head. If you’re the type who stares at a screen running through every way it could go wrong while nothing comes out, you know that voice, and nothing in the world is louder than it.
Get it out. Say it aloud, write it down, make a pros and cons list, talk to a friend. I’m doing it right now, talking through this into a voice memo.
Once it’s outside your head, you take the power back. You can finally see the anxiety clearly and calibrate it to the level the problem calls for.
Treat it as pure energy and conduct it.
Strip away the “good” or “bad,” the paranoia or the panic, and what’s left is energy. Then the only question is where you want to point it.
Last night I woke at 4 am with my mind spinning through everything I had to do for work. It had simply switched on (Thanks ADHD!). I kept ordering myself to go back to sleep, which did nothing.
So I stopped fighting it and named it: this is energy telling me to do things, and I get to decide where it goes. I conducted it into slow, deep breathing, into the feeling of my breath and my feet, moving it out of my racing head and into my body. That’s how I directed the energy instead of letting it direct me. It’s a minor step but helps me practice to conduct the energy when I need to.
✨ Conclusion
I’m a high-energy person. I always have been, and that’s okay. What’s changed is that I no longer see my anxiety as a flaw to apologize for or a switch I’m failing to keep off. It’s energy. Some of it I aim at a crisis, some at a coworker’s problem, some into my own breath at 4am. The skill isn’t silencing it. The skill is conducting it.
That’s the first gift. It was never something I had to overcome. It was something I had to learn to hold, and to point in the right direction.
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⏭️ Next Week
The gift of generational trauma.
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